Super-habitats

Lucio,

What is the difference between a bacteria-level self replicating robot and
a bacteria?
If I take that good old lab standby E.Coli and its big (in a relative way)
neighbour C.Elegans and really start to get to work on its genes, cut and
paste genes from every organisms on Earth and a few I make up myself until I
have a few hundred versions all with a different function that I can use in
whatever work it is I want to do, havent I just built self replicating
robots?

Darren

On 9/6/06, joe@strout.net > wrote:
(...)
> Well, the other problem is that they don't exist. When they do exist,
> then I think that will be time to analyze the other problems with them.
(...)

Actually some very simple prototypes do exist.
(http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/selfrep.ws.html) Also, it
has been demonstrated that conventional industrial robots can be
programmed to assemble robots of the same model, and that is a
self-replication of sorts. Currently, I would say that the
self-replicating robots are "virus-level": they can replicate
themselves but in a non-metabolic way, that is, using a supply of
ready pieces and parts.

However, in order to be useful for the mega-projects discussed, robots
will have to reach "bacteria-level" - that is, the ability to
replicate themselves starting from raw materials. In order to achieve
that, I think that in fact we will need self-replicating robot
*factories*, able to process ores and energy and use them to create
robots, which then will build another factory, and so on.